They dug and graded and parked right next to my tree during the build, and now it looks bad — what should I do?

At the time of the damage: cut root ends showing in a trench wall, a scraped or re-graded surface inside the root area, ruts, a compacted pad where equipment or materials sat, or fresh fill spread over the roots. Later, and this is what most people actually notice: leaves smaller than usual, fall color arriving weeks early, dead twigs at the top and outer edges of the crown, sprouts erupting along the trunk, and a canopy thin enough to see sky through. The damaged side of the crown usually goes first, matching the side that was dug. The tree lost part of its absorbing root system and, wherever soil was compacted, the pore space its roots depend on for oxygen. Tree roots are shallow and wide — most of them in roughly the top foot of soil and extending well past the dripline — so a trench that looked comfortably far from the trunk usually was not. Compaction does comparable damage and is invisible from the surface. And roots cut on one side means anchorage lost on that side, so this is a stability question as much as a health question.